The research. This way can be improved and made

The current research
project is concerned with gathering and analyzing data from participants of
Arabic and Vietnamese carers. Gathering research data in the traditional field
research would employ the cost, time consuming and possibly biased approach by
interviewing participants and
filling in questionnaires. Traditionally, the
researcher who attends the participants’ locations collects such data in
certain geographic regions and from specific groups, where participants are
interviewed and questionnaires are filled in. This process is time-consuming
because the researcher can only interview a limited number of participants,
costly because it involves traveling back and forth to participants’ locations
as well as provide interpreters for both languages to be able to communicate
with participants (Judith et el., 1981). Furthermore, it can be biased because
of preconceptions the researcher might have (Davis 1995, Lazaraton 1995). As a
consequence, only relatively limited areas can be covered by traditional field
research. This way can
be improved and made more efficient through Digital Humanities methods. Digital
Humanities techniques provide a remedy to these issues and open the research to
wider participants.

As
the cost of computer hardware and software continues to decrease, and the
popularity of the Internet increases, more segments of society are using the
Internet for communication and information (Fox et al., 2001; Nie et al.,
2002). Almost all of the groups and organization have an online presence these
days, where they not only provide information to the consumers but also provide
opportunities to researchers to access a variety of population who are
affiliated with these groups.

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Through
the use of the digital advanced technology, data can be collected
simultaneously online from participants. This allows us to blend a lower-cost,
web-based survey that provides a higher quality, higher response rate data
collection methodology at a lower overall cost. This web-based data collection
would make this a potentially cost-effective data-gathering tool for the
current research project. It also saves a lot of time for the researchers, as
it allows a researcher to reach thousands of people with common characteristics
in a short amount of time despite possibly being separated by great geographic
distances (Bachmann & Elfrink, 1996; Garton et al., 2003). Katz (2005)
states that ‘For a humanist, perhaps
nothing is more important than the capacity to organize and search large bodies
of information’ The digital humanities technologies enable a researcher to do
just that.

The current research result can be built with a
combination of data gathered from two sources:
Statistics (website analytics) and user contribution (Wikipedia). For
the purpose of this research, an analytics tool is used to collect statistics
data on the current website automatically through Google analytics. Additionally,
users can contribute to the wiki site by sharing their experiences with the
current research topic. While these types of data are gathered separately, they
complement each other and provide the research a full picture to answer the
research question.

Statistics (website analytics)

For the purpose of the research, a website
“Welcome to the NDIS” has been developed (available at
http://webe23.scem.uws.edu.au/ndis/).
It focuses on three languages (English, Arabic and Vietnamese) because the
research area intends to assess the language and technology barriers among
Arabic and Vietnamese carers and their ability to access the National Disability
Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Therefore, this website is conceived
as a platform for the research that allow people with internet connection to learn
about the NDIS in their preferred language. On the online platform Google analytics, the
researcher will be gathering data from the website’s user by tracking language usage statistics. This
approach can reveal a far larger amount of dataset from a wide geographic area
with low cost and effort than the traditional field research.

Any
good website should be easily usable and should be able to solve the problem
for which it is created (Donald A. Roman, 1998). For the purpose of this research,
a language dropdown menu has been provided at the top of each page, so that
users can select their preferred language. Selecting a language from the
dropdown will change the content of the entire website to that specific
language. This website seeks to provide an NDIS information to Culturally and
Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities. For this, a separate menu has been
provided so that users can find information about relevant communities, people
with disabilities, eligibility criteria. There is also a significant page named
carers stories that highlights some of the carers stories and statements in
relation to their experience with the NDIS. A ‘Become Involved’ button has been
provided which takes the user directly to ‘contact us’ page. Moreover, due to
the ever growing number of mobile users and the fact that most users use
internet on mobile and other small devices rather than the PC, the website has
been developed in such a way it is adaptable and responsive to multiple device
screens.

Image
1: a screen-shoot of ‘Welcome to the NDIS Website’

The
website has been developed using technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP,
and Codeignitor. XAMPP is the stack used, and the website has been hosted on a Linux
server.

Any
web page we see in the browser may be a combination of structure, style and
interactivity. These jobs are undertaken by three different technologies, HTML,
Javascript, and CSS which all browser know how to interpret (Starfire, 2007). HTML
provides structure to the website contents using various tags. Each tag has a
separate meaning and should be used accordingly. CSS is used to style the
contents of the website. Style includes the type and size of fonts, the spacing
between the words, alignment, height and width of elements. Javascript is used
to provide interactivity to the web page. It informs the browser how to change
the webpage in response to the events that happen due to actions performed by
users like click or scroll.

PHP
is the most used server-side programming language used for developing dynamic
websites. Codeignitor is a popular framework used for developing dynamic
websites using PHP. There are many other frameworks in use, but Codeignitor is
faster and lighter (Rasmus Lerdorf, 2008). However, a browser by default does
not understand any other language other than HTML, CSS and Javascript. So, to
make the browser understand a page developed in PHP, an interpreter is
required. PHP being a server-side
language, its interpreter can only run on a web server. Apache is the most commonly used server for PHP
websites, and is also free. XAMPP is a cross platform software package that
includes Apache server and PHP interpreter (“XAMPP”, 2018). Hence, the
researcher runs the XAMPP installer and all necessary software required for
developing the website to become available on the local computer. This is particularly helpful for users who
are not from the software development background.

Any
website when developed needs to be made available online to the users so that
they can access it through the internet. This process is called hosting a
website (“What is web hosting”, 2018). Another advantage of using PHP is that it
can run on all operating systems. Since Linux is a free and open source
operating system. The NDIS website created for this research is also hosted on
Linux server.

As
mentioned earlier, an evaluation of the website’s user is assessed through
obtaining Google analytics statistics by collecting user’s engagement and
language traffic data through Google analytic that would be significant tools to
the current research project. Thus, the researcher can track webpage and language
usage through Google analytics.

To
be able to use the Google analytics service, a Google account needs to be
created.

Then
Google provides a tracking code that needs to be included in every page from
which data needs to be collected. The code is nothing but a Javascript code
which lets Google know that this page needs to be tracked (“Tracking Code”,
2018).

Google Analytic Report of the Website:

Google through their
analytic service provides a comprehensive report of the website’s usage.

A non-advertised version
of the website with a limited group of people was initiated to get feedback
about the website usability and to test the stability of the platform. The image
below shows the tracking and usage data from 6th January to 12th
January 2018 as provided by Google.

Image 2 – Google analytics

The
first graph shows page-view each day. It can be seen that the number was
maximum on 6th, decreased immensely on 7th, and then rose
gradually till 9th and finally reached zero on 10th and
remained same after that.

The
tabular data below and the pie-chart on the right show which pages were
accessed and how many times. It is clear that the majority of users only
accessed the website’s home page in their specific language. A few visited the
stories and other pages. This data can also be used to reach various
conclusions like the majority of users used the website in English language
about 83% of the total users, then the Arabic language users (about 12 percent)
and the number of users in Vietnamese language is the least, only 4.36 percent
of the total.

User contribution (Wikipedia)

The
actual page could not be published on the Wikipedia.com website as it was
rejected by the Wikipedia moderator. Following was the reason given by the
Wikipedia moderator-

“This appears to be a research piece rather
than an encyclopedia contribution. I would suggest that the author might prefer
to try to publish at https://theconversation.com/au The Conversation where
opinion pieces are the norm.”

For
the purpose of this research, a separate wiki site has been created using
Mediwiki and hosted (available at http://webe23.scem.uws.edu.au/ndiswiki/index.php/Main_Page). Besides data gathered by the
platform, users can contribute through an edit button on a wiki site that has been linked to the ‘Welcome
to the NDIS’ website through a hyperlink that takes the user with one click to
that wiki site.

The
creation of this Wiki site page is an important step toward social knowledge
management. Social knowledge management can be defined as applying social media
in the knowledge management context to identify, share, document, transfer,
develop, use or evaluate knowledge (“Social knowledge management”, 2018,
“Definition”, para 1). There are many advantages of it. As users can contribute
themselves, the quantity of knowledge increases. With review facilities like
user ratings and comments, the quality of the knowledge also becomes better
(“Social knowledge management”, 2018). It explores the ways for
inclusion and engagement in online platforms. The page aims to encourage
participation in the creation of the content by people who do not normally do
this or have this access or opportunity.

This would
help the researcher to understand some of the ways in which this group of
people might engage with technology, and how the Wiki site can be creatively
employed by this people to reveal something of their experience with the NDIS.

Nonetheless,
it is essential to note that the Wiki site is not a discussion forum as
Wikipedia is a very energetic place (“Wikipedia:Editing Policy”, 2018). In
general, more caution was exercised in complying with the platform policies and
guidelines than in editing the article itself. Minor edits were done to the
current page, such as formatting changes, grammatical improvement and inline
referencing clarification.

CONCLUSION

This paper focuses on
how Digital Humanities (DH) techniques can be deployed to facilitate the
research methodologies. There
are two digital methods to be deployed in the
current research project. It describes the platform Google analytics together
with its website, shows two requirements especially important to presents
preliminary results from multiple language users. This the analytics data will identify
how users behave and which language will they use the most. Use Google
analytics to track exactly which language of the website was mostly chosen and
to find some additional information about users through the Wiki site. The
information of this analytics data can support and inform the research project,
using Google Analytics as the tool of choice for carrying out this research.
The data obtained from Google Analytics and taking an analytics-first approach
to research will help to build strong foundations for the research project.
Google Analytics data can be used at the start of the research data process to
get a rough idea of the types of users visiting the website and the language
mostly chosen. Additionally, people are more likely to share their experience
honestly on the wiki site because of the anonymity and flexibility with regards
to time than in a traditional interview where they may give answers just for
the sake of answering. In light of the
above, it can be concluded that Digital Humanities techniques provide better,
efficient , low cost and less time consuming ways to collect relevant for
research.